The Man Without a Face (7 page)

“All right.”

She got up and went to the door. Just before she opened it she turned. “What about McLeod?” she whispered. “For Mother.”

“Are you crazy, Meg? You’ve got to be kidding. Have you taken a good look at him? Can you see Mother wanting to—well, you know what I mean?”

Meg sighed. “N9,I suppose not. Sometimes I think it’s a pity we weren’t bom blind.”

58

“What do you mean by that? Who’d want to be born

blind?”

“If we were born that way, we wouldn’t know any different so we wouldn’t feel deprived. Then everybody wouldn’t always judge everybody else by the way they look.”

She opened the door, peered around, and then slipped

out.

It was a novel thought, and I pondered it on the way up to McLeod’s house. I hadn’t been able to get back to sleep, what with thinking over what Meg had said, and Moxie wanting some concentrated affection and communication before he slipped through the window, so I left earlier than usual, and arrived up at McLeod’s house about a quarter to eight.

Usually, when I walked into the room we always worked in, he was there. This morning he wasn’t. He wasn’t in the bam, either, because I went and looked. Since the horse stall was empty, too, I guessed he was still out riding. He’d kept me so busy that I hadn’t asked about the horse, or anything else. It was work, work, work. I always had the feeling that if I said anything personal at all, like What do you do the rest of the time? or Is it true you write porno? or even Did you teach? (he’d never even answered that one, or maybe I hadn’t put it in the form of a question. Besides, who needed to ask?)—he’d toss me out. I knew he was telling the truth when he said he was sorry he’d got into this, because he made it perfectly obvious that if I put one toe over some kind of invisible line he’d drawn—such as not doing any of the whacking big assignments he’d dole out, or saying casually “Aeneas sure was a pompous ass”—I’d just get one of his chilling stares as though I had done something socially unacceptable. Because of the lousy

59

exam, but also not to give him the satisfaction of getting rid of me, I kept on my side of the line, which meant keeping my mouth shut. Which was a pity, in a way, and a waste, because over the years I had really perfected the technique of how to keep a teacher from coming to grips with the fact that you haven’t done your homework or don’t know the answer to the question he’s asking you.

In the school I go to it’s considered repressive and damaging to the personality for a teacher not to pick up any subject a kid introduces. So if you don’t know the correct dates of the Civil War, say, you just let on that you can’t get your mind off the industrial ravages to the ecology or the terrible inequities of the electoral system or the racist nature of education or the Vietnam War or something like that, and if you have any skill at all you’ll probably never have to feed him back the Civil War dates. One girl got so overwrought and convincing over dates representing an authoritarian approach to education that the teacher never mentioned them again. Some of the really hip kids have managed to carry it right through graduation, after which, of course (and if they know they’ll blow their Regents), they drop out as a protest against the Establishment. There was only one teacher who didn’t go along with that and who was crass enough to keep at you until it finally became evident that you hadn’t a clue as to what he was talking about, hadn’t read the assignment, and couldn’t hack his questions. So we had a secret meeting of the student body, after which the kids produced symptoms of such mass neurosis when they got home that the parents held their own emergency meeting and all but marched on the school. The teacher was fired.

But Monster McLeod obviously went by the old fascist methods, and since he had me where it hurts and St. Matthew’s apparently really cared how much you knew about

60

that pietistic ass Aeneas and his soggy girlfriend Dido, who kept reminding me more and more of Mother when she wants me to do something, I knew I had to live with it.

But to get back to that morning, I poked around the bam, looking at some of the harness on the wall and breathing in the smells of hay and horse and leather. There was a ladder going up to the upper part so I went up and waded around in the hay. It was really cool. I lay down and rolled like a puppy. The hay tickled my nose and my mouth and my midriff where my shirt rolled up. Then I got up and plunged around to another side and looked through a low square window with open shutters. It was a much better view than from the house. From here you could see the whole curve of the coastline: the village far below and to the right, the dinghy pier, the beach, and beyond, the rocks where the pines and spruce came right down to the water. It was beautiful and peaceful. After a while I lay down on my stomach in the hay and stared through the window. The air, which was fresher and cooler than down around our house, came in smelling salty. I put my hands under my chin and closed my eyes to see if I could smell both salt and hay at the same time. . . .

I had decided to go for a ride on McLeod’s horse and was about to put a saddle on him when I noticed several things: he was about four times the size of any ordinary horse—more like an elephant, his ears rising above the stall were getting larger and larger, his eyes were bright red, and he was going to kill me. To achieve that he was backing me into a comer, neighing wildly and rearing and shoving me in the side with his hooves. I was terrified but also puzzled as to why I wasn’t already dead, because his hooves, which were like blades, kept coming at me, but instead of slicing off the top of my head, they merely nudged me in the ribs, like mitts. Then I

6I

got really frightened, because that stinking horse bared his teeth and spoke, just like that putrid commercial. It said in McLeod’s voice, “Wake up, Charles.”

I opened my eyes. McLeod was standing over me. “Sorry to disturb you,” he said drily.

I couldn’t think what he was doing in my bedroom and was wondering how I could smuggle him out of the house without Mother or Gloria seeing him when he said, with equal sarcasm, “Whenever you’re ready.”

I sat up, saw the hay, and then felt like a fool. McLeod moved around the loft, stepped to the edge, put his hand on it, and vaulted down. Neat. I started to follow.

He looked up. “Use the ladder.”

But of course I didn’t. My landing left a lot to be desired. I fell on my back and knocked the wind right out of me. It was awful. I felt like I was drowning. I couldn’t get in a breath. Dimly I saw McLeod turn, look at me and then come back on the double. He picked me up, bent me over, and started pounding on my back. Suddenly I could breathe.

“Are you all right?” he asked as I stood up, drawing in great gulps of air.

I nodded.

“You seem to have a mania for picking the one way of doing anything that will get you in trouble. Next time do what I tell you.”

“Yes.” I didn’t feel up to arguing.

“All right, come on. I can’t get Richard in here until you get out.”

We started walking out. “What do you mean?” I asked, and saw the empty stall as I passed it.

“What I say. When I led Richard in here he started going berserk. Neighed and reared and tried to pull the reins out of my hand.”

62

“So that’s what I heard! I mean I was dreaming I was in the stall with Richard and he was rearing and neighing and trying to kill me.” My head was beginning to clear. “You mean that even though I was upstairs in the middle of all that hay he knew I was there?”

“That’s not unusual. A horse won’t go over an unsafe bridge even though it looks perfectly all right to his rider. You know that.”

“But what spooked him?”

“He’s been abused. All people spook him, as you put

it.”

I had stopped short of the door. “But he’s all right with

you.”

“Now he is. It took me weeks to get near him without his trying to stampede or shy, and more weeks to mount

him.”

“Did you know he was that way when you bought him?” “Of course.”

“Is that why you bought him?” I was galloping ahead with my questions to get as much as I could of this new slant on McLeod. I thought it would be hard to imagine him gentling a frightened animal but to my surprise, it wasn’t. And of course, the moment I came to that conclusion, he clammed up.

“I think that’s enough of the press conference this morning. You’ve managed to delay your lesson for half an hour so you should not feel it’s been in vain.”

But I wasn’t entirely finished. “Is that how you knew I was up there?”

“It seemed a logical deduction.”

He said it so drily I wanted to laugh. As we stepped from the dark stable into the sunlight I glanced up at him. At that moment he was looking down at me, smiling slightly. It

63

was a nice smile, but I got the full benefit of his burned side. I looked away.

“Go back to the house and start translating where you left off.”

His voice this time was different—so cold I wondered if he had seen me look away from him. I glanced back at him and for a second, just before he turned his face and walked off, I knew he had seen how I felt.

I watched him go over to a tree where he had tied Richard, then I went back to the house and opened up Vergil, wishing he hadn’t seen my reaction quite so plainly. I was a little surprised, too, because one of the compensations of having a stupid look has always been that no one could tell what I was thinking. It used to drive The Hairball back up the tree, because all his students used to tell him how perceptive he was. He’d come home and have his ego inflated a little more by Mother and Gloria, and then he’d turn his radar equipment on me. And I’d just look at him as though he were talking Choctaw and bounce those waves right back at him.

But McLeod was not The Hairball. In fact, I found him puzzling. When he came back in the house it was as though we were back to square one, Vergil on ice, and that’s the way it went for the next week or so. Every now and then he’d say something dry and funny and I’d laugh, and for a minute there we’d be on the same wavelength. I liked him then, I liked him a lot. Then bang! Out of the blue he’d freeze and I’d be back in the tundra.

“Do you like him?” Meg asked in one of our dawn’s- early-light conversations.

By this time Moxie had accepted Meg as a blood relative and was purring as she ran a finger up and down his spine.

“Yes,” I said, rather grudgingly. “He’s okay—at least

64

some of the time.” It was funny, but not even to Meg did I want to say how I felt.

“What’s he like?”

You can see now why I find females tiresome. That’s a very female kind of a question. “How the blazes do I know what he’s like? That’s a stupid question.”

Meg didn’t say anything, which I always find suspicious in women. It usually means they’ve decided to try for another opening.

I was right. Meg said, “Does he like you?”

“Will you cut out the inquisition? What are you anyway—the FBI?”

Still, it was an interesting question, and one to which I hadn’t given any thought. I mean, I’m usually more interested in what I think of people than what they think about me, barring, of course, crucial types like Mother and Gloria where the answer has great bearing on how comfortable I am. Even my stepfathers didn’t trigger me that way. For one thing, I came as a kind of package deal with Mother, which reduced the alternatives: They had to like me—or pretend to. For another, I didn’t care. Besides, if you’re an adolescent, it’s a real challenge to get any member of the older’ generation to admit to plain not liking you. It’s against their principles. For real! You can sweat out weeks of thought on how you can most bug an adult and come up with something really new and gross, and ail you’ll get is understanding. The hairier the act the more you’re called an idealist reacting to an unresponsive society. I mean, it’s frustrating. Joey swears he knows a boy who was so mad when he was asked (politely) to take the garbage out, that he emptied it instead—coffee grounds, melted Jell-O, baby’s upchuck and everything—-right on the new living-room carpet before

65

God and everybody. The first thing that happened was that his father apologized for having been so insensitive to his needs. His mother burst into tears and said it was all her fault, and the next day he got the new bicycle he’d been hankering for. So why bother?

But no imagining could produce an image of McLeod looking apologetic or guilt-ridden. All I could summon up was that chilling stare that left me in no doubt as to who would shortly be behind the eight ball, and the dry half smile that vanished so quickly that day in the stable. No, I decided, he couldn’t like me. In fact, he must hate me. The thought made me oddly unhappy.

I must have been thinking about it the next day as we struggled through some awful diatribe by Wordsworth drooling over a half-witted child named Lucy, because McLeod put down the books and said, “If my face bothers you that much you can sit at the table over there by the window.” I realized then that I had been staring at him, and I could feel my own face get hot.

“I—it doesn’t b-bother me. I mean—I’m s-sorry. . . . I d-didn’t—” Embarrassment won out. I couldn’t go on.

He got up and ambled over to the window, his hands in his pockets. There was an awful silence. Here I go, I thought. Out. But it just goes to show that you should never say never, or think that just because your imagination boggles at something it can’t happen.

McLeod said, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. Finish your comment about the poem.”

I must have been really unstrung. What I wanted to do was to tell him somehow that I wasn’t even thinking about his face, although I could see, with me looking at him and away again, off and on like that, why he would think so. I tried to get my thoughts back to Lucy, hardly a mind-